I was reading an interesting bit in Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail about how top 10 lists of things that are spread thinly across multiple categories tend to be banal. His primary example is that of top 10 lists of artists from all genres. Any casual reader of such a list would immediately recognize the loss of focus inherent in such a list–it’s simply a jumble of popular artists with barely any depth.

While reading the example, I was reminded of a top 10 contest two of my friends and I played during my years in college. We had decided to create a list of the best songs of all time. We would each come up with 10 songs that we felt would make the list, and we would go down the line and eliminate songs from each others’ lists until we only had 10 left–presumebly, the 10 best.

We were really excited, as if the final list would be a miracle list straight from the heavens.

We quickly went to the task of whittling down the 3 lists. One person would exclaim, “No way that song would ever be on my list. That’s out!” And thus, this went on for another 30 minutes. We all had similar tastes in music, but just different enough to cause arguments of religious proportions. At one point, the two of them threatened to skin my alive if I blackballed Soul Asylum’s Runaway Train.

But, as the number of songs dwindled, we began to notice something. The list was becoming quite familiar. Yes, we had all seen it before. It started to look like a Billboard music chart.

We were horrified. This wasn’t what we had intended. Our tastes are eclectic and niche. The last thing we wanted was a final list that mirrored the pop charts.

The real problem underlying it all was that our tastes were different enough to cause a “graying” of the final list. Combining our tastes into one list resulted in a bland popular songs list, without any artists that delved deeply into a genre.

Just like with our music charts, it’s important to remember that social media and the filters that sift through them need to flexible enough to compare things in a focused genre. It’s much more interesting to see the top 10 horror films that included a clown than it is to see the top 10 hits of the century. By leveraging modern filters and searches, we are at a point where producing such niche lists is just as easy as finding the top hits.

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